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New Michael Robbins poem in Commonweal

We probably don't highlight the poetry that appears on our site enough, but we do want to bring to your attention a new poem from Michael Robbins that was just posted (and that will appear in the upcoming print edition of the magazine). Robbins is the author of the collection Alien vs. Predator, about which John Wilson had this to say in our pages in December 2012:

Every once in a while, a book appears as if out of nowhere, uncanny in its authority, combining the shock of the new with the shock of recognition. Michael Robbins’s Alien vs. Predator has given me a sense of what early readers of The Waste Land must have felt in 1922, what it must have been like to pick up a copy of Wise Blood at the bookstore in 1952.

For such works, the usual terms don’t apply. You don’t necessarily “like” or “dislike” them; rather, you circle them warily, marveling, curious, seeking to understand.